If you are choosing solar shading analysis software in Nigeria, the useful question is not how much energy the shade costs. It is what the shade costs in fuel. Nigerian arrays are almost always paired with a battery bank and, on commercial sites, with a diesel or petrol generator that is still sitting there as a backstop. In a grid-tied market a shading loss shows up as a slightly larger utility bill. In Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt it shows up as generator runtime, because the load still has to be served and the battery arrived at the evening already short. At around NGN 1,200 per litre of diesel and roughly 0.33 litres per kWh, that replacement energy costs near NGN 400 per kWh against a NERC Band A tariff nearer NGN 200. The shade is not twice as annoying. It is twice as expensive per unit, and worse again on a petrol set. This guide ranks ten shading tools in naira and shows which ones can actually answer the fuel question.
Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software in Nigeria for 2026 is SurgePV, at roughly NGN 2.0 million (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, for the design side: 8,760-hour module-level shading with bypass-diode physics and a near-object scene built from satellite imagery. For the economic question, how many extra generator hours a shadow causes, HOMER Pro at US$1,575 a year on Base or US$3,100 on Professional is the honest answer and we rank it second for that reason.
This page is for Nigerian designers and EPC engineers whose yield numbers are being challenged by a client with a fuel log. It gives the Lagos sun arithmetic first, then the ranking, then the mistakes we keep correcting. The physics side of shading is covered in the global pillar on solar shading analysis software; everything below is what changes at 6.5 degrees north with a generator in the yard.
Why Inter-Row Spacing Is Almost Never Your Problem in Nigeria
Nigeria runs from roughly 4 to 13 degrees north. That is close enough to the equator that the seasonal swing in solar elevation is small and the winter sun is still high. December solar noon elevation is 90 degrees minus latitude minus 23.44 degrees of declination, which puts Lagos at about 60 degrees, Abuja at about 57 degrees and Kano at about 54 degrees. In June the sun passes slightly north of vertical at all three.
Work the row pitch. A 2.28 m module in portrait at the 10 to 15 degree tilt most Nigerian flat roofs use has a vertical rise of 0.40 to 0.59 m and a horizontal base of 2.20 to 2.25 m. At Lagos December noon the shadow behind that row is 0.23 to 0.34 m, so the minimum pitch is about 2.5 m. Protect a 9 am to 3 pm design window and the numbers barely move: at 9 am solar time on 21 December the Lagos sun is still 37 degrees up and 54 degrees east of south, which turns 0.59 m of rise into a row-direction shadow of only 0.46 m. Minimum pitch lands near 2.66 m, a ground coverage ratio of about 0.83.
| Location | Latitude | Dec noon elevation | 9 am Dec elevation | Shadow per 1 m of height (9 am) | Minimum pitch, 2.28 m module at 15 degrees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lagos | 6.5N | 60° | 36.9° | 1.33 m | ~2.66 m |
| Abuja | 9.1N | 57° | 35° | 1.43 m | ~2.69 m |
| Kano | 12.0N | 54° | 33° | 1.54 m | ~2.73 m |
| Cape Town, for contrast | 33.9S | 32.6° in June | 18.5° in June | 3.00 m | ~4.47 m |
Read the last row and the point lands. A Nigerian designer copying a European or even a South African row pitch throws away roughly 40 percent of the modules the roof could legitimately carry, and never tells the client, because the loss is invisible in the proposal. That does not mean spacing is free. Tight rows cut airflow and raise cell temperature, and Nigerian roofs already run hot. Set pitch from geometry, then add cleaning and maintenance access, then check the thermal consequence.
Bring one of your own sites to a free SurgePV demo. We will build the 3D roof from a satellite address, run the 8,760-hour shading simulation, and hand you the SLD, BOQ and branded proposal on the call.
Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingWhat Actually Shades a Nigerian Roof
Near-object shading carries the whole problem here, and the objects are specific to how Nigerian property is built. Perimeter compound walls run high for security. Overhead water storage tanks sit on steel stands because municipal supply is unreliable. Neighbouring buildings go up on tight urban plots with no setback discipline. Mature trees in older Lagos, Ibadan and Enugu neighbourhoods sit right against the building line and grow.
Here is what each casts at Lagos December noon and at 9 am solar time on the same day, using shadow length equal to height divided by the tangent of solar elevation.
| Obstruction | Typical height above array plane | Dec noon shadow | Dec 9 am shadow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compound wall | 2.5 m | 1.44 m | 3.33 m |
| Overhead water tank on stand | 3.5 m | 2.02 m | 4.66 m |
| Stairwell housing or lift room | 3.0 m | 1.73 m | 3.99 m |
| Satellite dish and mast | 1.5 m | 0.87 m | 2.00 m |
| Neighbouring 3-storey building | 10 m | 5.77 m | 13.3 m |
| Mature mango or almond tree | 12 m | 6.93 m | 15.9 m |
Two features of that table matter more than the numbers. First, the morning and evening shadows are two to three times the noon shadow even at 6.5 degrees north, so a wall or a neighbour that looks harmless at midday is doing real damage at 8 am and 5 pm. Second, trees and neighbouring construction both grow. A shading model built on today’s satellite tile is a snapshot, and on a 25-year asset that is not good enough. Model the tree at ten-year height and the adjacent plot at the height it is permitted to reach.
💡 Fast tip
Photograph every wall, tank and tree next to a person of known height during the survey. It converts a guessed height into a measured one in about ninety seconds.
The Displaced Kilowatt-Hour Test: What a Shadow Costs in Fuel
This is our named framework for Nigerian work, and it is the reason this page exists. It replaces the question every global shading tool answers, which is “what percentage of annual energy is lost”, with the question a Nigerian client actually asks, which is “how much more fuel will I buy”.
Five steps.
- Convert the shading loss to kilowatt-hours, not percent. Take the annual shaded energy in kWh from the simulation. A 20 kWp Lagos array producing 1,600 kWh per kWp yields 32,000 kWh a year, so an 8 percent shading loss is 2,560 kWh.
- Decide which of those kilowatt-hours would have been used, not exported. In Nigeria essentially all of it, because there is no functioning small-scale export settlement. That is the opposite of a European assumption and it makes the loss worse, not better.
- Find out what serves the load instead. If the grid is present at that hour, the replacement costs the NERC band tariff, near NGN 200 per kWh on Band A. If the grid is absent, the generator runs and the replacement costs fuel.
- Price the fuel honestly by generator type. A 60 kVA diesel set at sensible loading burns near 0.33 litres per kWh, so at NGN 1,200 per litre the energy costs about NGN 400 per kWh. A small petrol set of the sort backing up a shop or a residence burns 0.6 to 0.9 litres per kWh, which at petrol prices lands between roughly NGN 600 and NGN 900 per kWh.
- Convert to runtime hours, because that is what wears the machine. Those 2,560 lost kilowatt-hours, if they land in hours where the grid is absent and the genset carries roughly 29 kW of load, are about 88 additional generator hours a year. Service intervals, oil, filters and eventual overhaul all key off runtime hours, not off litres.
Verdict. The same 8 percent shading loss is worth roughly NGN 512,000 a year if you price it at a Band A tariff and roughly NGN 1.02 million a year if the generator covers it, before you count the 88 hours added to the service clock. If your software prints only the percentage, you have not finished the analysis.
Step 3 is where almost every tool fails, and the failure is structural rather than a missing feature. Deciding whether the grid, the battery or the generator serves a given hour requires an hourly load profile, a grid availability pattern and a battery state of charge simulation running together. A shading engine that produces an annual percentage has thrown away the time dimension that the answer depends on. That is why HOMER Pro sits at number two on this list despite drawing no roof, designing no strings and producing no proposal.
Harmattan Dust Is Soiling, Not Shading
Between roughly November and February, dry dust-laden wind off the Sahara deposits fine particulate across northern and central Nigeria, reaching the coast in weaker form. A large share of what Nigerian EPCs record as shading loss during those months is soiling loss, and the two failures need opposite fixes. Re-stringing an array to solve a dust problem spends money and changes nothing.
Four checks separate them.
- Spatial signature. Shading is geometric and non-uniform: a corner, an edge row, a wedge pointing away from a wall. Harmattan soiling is broadly uniform across the array with a mild gradient toward the lower edge of each module.
- Time-of-day signature. Shading clusters into a fixed daily window that drifts slowly across the year. Soiling is flat across the daylight curve and simply scales the whole day down.
- Rain response. The cleanest test available. A heavy rain event during the wet season recovers most of a soiling deficit within a day. Shading losses do not move at all.
- Seasonal shape. Soiling peaks between November and February. Near-object shading loss in Nigeria peaks in the low-sun hours all year and shows only a mild December emphasis, because the December sun is still 60 degrees up at noon.
The tool consequence is concrete: a platform that folds a flat global soiling default of about 2 percent into the shading figure will overstate yield through harmattan and give you a number you cannot defend when the client’s own generation report disagrees. Shading loss and soiling belong on separate, independently editable lines of the loss tree, with a monthly soiling profile rather than one annual value.
⚠️ Watch out
If a January performance shortfall recovers after the first serious rain and then holds, it was harmattan dust. Nothing in the shading model needed changing.
Cloud-Only Tools and Nigerian Site Connectivity
One practical constraint deserves stating because it changes tool selection and no vendor brochure mentions it. A great deal of Nigerian survey work happens on sites with poor or metered mobile data: an industrial estate outside Ogun, a mini-grid village site, a factory roof where the data signal is one bar and the client is standing next to you waiting for an answer.
Cloud-only platforms are excellent in the office and awkward there. Desktop tools that run offline on a laptop, notably PVsyst and PV*SOL Premium, keep working. In practice most Nigerian teams we work with resolve this by capturing measurements and photographs on site, then building the shading scene back at the office rather than trying to model live. If your workflow genuinely requires modelling in the field, weight offline capability heavily and accept the loss of AI roof capture.
Want a second opinion on a disputed yield number? Bring the client’s fuel log and the shading report to our engineering team and we will run the displaced kilowatt-hour arithmetic against your own site. Talk to our engineers.
Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Software in Nigeria Compared
Every vendor below is quoted in the currency it actually bills in, with an approximate naira figure at NGN 1,550 to the US dollar, NGN 1,675 to the euro and NGN 1,940 to the Swiss franc. Every naira figure moves with the exchange rate and equipment pricing moves with it too. Treat the conversions as indicative and re-check before you commit a budget.
| # | Tool | Price (vendor currency, approx NGN) | Shading capability | Answers the fuel question? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SurgePV | US$1,299/user/yr (~NGN 2.0m) | 8,760-hour module-level, AI near-object scene, per-module heatmap | Partly, through hybrid and displacement modelling |
| 2 | HOMER Pro | US$1,575/yr Base, US$3,100 Professional (~NGN 2.4m to 4.8m) | Weak geometry, takes a derate or hourly series as input | ✓ Best on this list |
| 3 | PVsyst | CHF 700/user/yr (~NGN 1.36m) | Reference near-shading 3D scene and loss diagram | Partly, through its storage and genset module |
| 4 | PV*SOL Premium | EUR 845/named user/yr + VAT (~NGN 1.42m) | 3D shading animation, battery and genset modules, offline | Partly |
| 5 | HelioScope | US$1,620/yr Basic, US$2,640 Pro (~NGN 2.5m to 4.1m) | Clean module-level loss tree | ✗ |
| 6 | Aurora Solar | US$1,620/yr Basic, US$2,640 Premium (~NGN 2.5m to 4.1m) | Strong irradiance maps, LIDAR where available | ✗ |
| 7 | Scanifly | Not publicly listed | Drone photogrammetry as-built obstruction capture | ✗ Capture only |
| 8 | Solmetric SunEye 210 | US$2,195 base, North America (~NGN 3.4m) plus duty | Measured on-roof skyline, no modelling assumption | ✗ Measurement only |
| 9 | PVGIS horizon import | Free | Far-horizon profile from an open dataset | ✗ |
| 10 | Victron, Sunsynk and Deye tooling | Free with hardware | No shading model, but real state of charge history | ✓ After the fact, from measured data |
Note what that table now shows: SurgePV is not the cheapest option on it. PVsyst and PV*SOL both come in below it, and HelioScope Basic and Aurora Basic both land at US$1,620 a year against a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899. Positions 1 and 3 to 6 are shading engines. Position 2 is an economics and dispatch engine that consumes a shading result rather than producing one. Positions 7 to 9 are capture and data sources. Position 10 is monitoring, and it earns its place because it is the only entry that shows you what actually happened to the battery.
1. SurgePV
What it does best for Nigerian shading. SurgePV runs a true 8,760-hour, module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan, with no add-on tier gating it. For a Nigerian site the parts that earn the ranking are the near-object workflow and the hybrid link. You enter an address, the AI builds the 3D roof from satellite imagery in under a minute and proposes obstruction objects, and you correct heights by hand, which on a compound wall and tank site you will. Arbitrary objects with explicit heights mean a 2.5 m wall, a tank on a 2 m stand, a permitted three-storey neighbour and a tree at ten-year height all go in as separate scenarios. Soiling sits on its own line with an editable monthly profile, which is what harmattan needs. The annual per-module heatmap is what actually drives re-stringing and MPPT grouping. Crucially for this market, the shading result feeds the same project’s hybrid battery sizing and generator displacement financial model, so you can see a shading change move the fuel number rather than only the percentage.
Pricing. US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, roughly NGN 2.0 million, so US$6,495 or about NGN 10 million for five seats. A single Individual seat is US$1,899. Free trial, no card. Say it plainly: PVsyst at CHF 700 and PV*SOL at EUR 845 are both cheaper per seat, and Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year undercuts a SurgePV Individual licence.
Who it suits. Nigerian EPCs and C&I installers who want a defensible shading study attached to every hybrid quote.
Honest limitations, and they matter on this page specifically. SurgePV does not optimise multi-source dispatch. It will show you a hybrid system’s behaviour, but it will not search thousands of PV, battery and genset combinations for the least-cost answer under a shading constraint the way HOMER Pro does, so a mini-grid tender belongs in HOMER. It is cloud-only with no offline design mode, which is a genuine problem on poorly connected Nigerian sites. It carries no NERC tariff band library and no Nigerian component price feed, so band assumptions and naira rates are yours to maintain against a moving exchange rate. Utility-scale single-axis tracker shading is still maturing, so cross-check a large ground-mount in PVsyst. And it does no drone capture, so an undocumented roof still needs Scanifly or a manual survey upstream.
See the SurgePV shadow analysis module for the engine, and the best solar design software in Nigeria ranking for the wider workflow comparison.
2. HOMER Pro
What it does best, and why it is second on a shading page. HOMER Pro is not a shading tool. It has no 3D scene editor worth the name and it will not tell you which module is shaded. What it does is the thing this whole page argues matters: it dispatches PV, battery, generator and an intermittent grid hour by hour, tracks battery state of charge, and returns litres of fuel, generator runtime hours and cost. Feed it your shaded hourly production series from PVsyst or SurgePV instead of the clean one, run it twice, and the difference between the two runs is the real cost of the shade in naira and in engine hours. That is the number a Nigerian finance director recognises.
Pricing. Base US$187.50 a month or US$1,575 a year, Professional US$373.50 a month or US$3,100 a year, Expert US$568.50 a month or US$4,650 a year. Annual billing saves about 33 percent and there is a 25 percent discount at four or more licences. At NGN 1,550 to the dollar that is roughly NGN 2.4 million, NGN 4.8 million and NGN 7.2 million a year. HOMER Pro is a UL Solutions product.
Who it suits. Mini-grid developers, Rural Electrification Agency programme work, and any C&I job where the generator is the incumbent and the shading argument is really an argument about fuel.
Honest limitations. No roof layout, no string design, no single-line diagram, no bill of quantities, no proposal, and no ability to compute a shading loss from geometry in the first place. It is always a second seat alongside a design tool. The interface is dense and unforgiving, and it is desktop-bound. For a residential installer doing two systems a month it solves a problem you do not have.
3. PVsyst
What it does best. The near-shading 3D scene editor remains the most complete implementation of obstruction geometry available, and the loss diagram is the artefact a development finance institution reads fastest. Its monthly soiling table handles harmattan properly rather than forcing one annual value, and its storage and genset module will model a Nigerian hybrid to a reasonable standard without leaving the tool. On lender acceptance PVsyst beats SurgePV outright and we say so.
Pricing. CHF 700 per user per year for a Professional licence, roughly NGN 1.36 million. This is an annual subscription rather than a perpetual purchase. Education is CHF 420, Training and Research CHF 560, and group discounts run 5 to 20 percent by quantity. It is cheaper per seat than SurgePV.
Honest limitations. Building the near-shading scene by hand is slow, commonly an hour or more for a cluttered compound that a satellite-driven tool proposes in a minute. Desktop-only and Windows-first. No proposal output, no client-facing heatmap, no NERC content, and its generator economics are thinner than HOMER’s. Our engineering group’s guide to reading a PVsyst loss diagram is the quickest way to learn what the output is telling you, and our PVsyst alternative comparison covers where teams replace it.
4. PV*SOL Premium
What it does best. The 3D shading animation is the strongest client-facing shading artefact on the market. It renders shadow movement across the array through the day and the year and produces a per-module shade frequency visual that a factory owner understands instantly. On a disputed site where the client insists the neighbour’s wall is not a problem, that ends the argument. It also has battery and generator modules, and it runs entirely offline, which matters here.
Pricing. EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT for PVSOL premium, roughly NGN 1.42 million, with standard PVSOL at EUR 585. This is a user-based annual subscription. There is no perpetual licence on sale any more: licences bought before 19 November 2024 remain usable indefinitely, but maintenance renewals ended on 1 October 2024. Cheaper per seat than SurgePV.
Honest limitations. Desktop and Windows-only, effectively single-user, dated interface, manual scene building, and a smaller library of the inverters actually sold in Nigeria. It is now a recurring euro subscription rather than a one-time purchase, so a naira budget carries full currency exposure every year. Support hours do not align well with West African working days.
5. HelioScope
What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation with the cleanest loss tree in the category, separating shading from soiling, mismatch and thermal losses. On a 500 kW Lagos warehouse roof it is fast and the output is accepted by technical reviewers without argument.
Pricing. Basic US$159 a month or US$1,620 a year, Pro US$259 a month or US$2,640 a year, each covering one user and 10 projects a month, with DC design capped at 1.25 MW and 5 MW respectively. Enterprise is quote only. That is roughly NGN 2.5 million and NGN 4.1 million a year.
Honest limitations. Obstruction modelling is manual with no AI roof build, so a walled compound takes real drafting time. Storage modelling is thin and there is no generator displacement economics at all, which in a market where the battery is 35 to 50 percent of capital cost is a serious gap. Our HelioScope alternative guide covers the migration path.
6. Aurora Solar
What it does best. Irradiance mapping and the shade engine are genuinely strong, and where LIDAR coverage exists the roof detection is excellent. If your Nigerian team also does design outsourcing for US installers, Aurora fluency has commercial value independent of its technical merit.
Pricing. Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually, US$159 monthly. Premium US$220 annually, US$259 monthly. Enterprise custom. Both Basic and Premium cover one user and 50 projects a month. That is about NGN 2.5 million and NGN 4.1 million a year. LIDAR modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling sit in Premium, plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, and site models start at US$9.99.
Honest limitations. LIDAR coverage in Nigeria is effectively absent, so the feature that makes Aurora excellent in California degrades to manual tracing in Ikeja. Its roof AI is trained on North American imagery and handles walled compounds, tanks and dense infill construction poorly. Storage modelling and bankable shade reports are gated to Premium, and plan sets are billed separately on top. On price, though, Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year is cheaper than SurgePV per seat, not more expensive, and any claim otherwise is out of date. See our Aurora Solar alternative writeup.
7. Scanifly
What it does best. Drone photogrammetry turns a five-minute flight into an as-built 3D site model with every wall, tank, mast and tree where it actually is, at its actual height. On a multi-level Lagos Island building or a congested industrial site, this removes the single largest source of Nigerian shading error, which is a guessed obstruction height.
Pricing. Scanifly does not publish pricing. The per-project and per-seat figures circulating in software directories are unverified third-party estimates, so a direct quote is the only usable number.
Honest limitations. It is a capture tool, not a simulation engine, so you still export into something that runs the physics. Nigerian drone operation requires civil aviation permissions that installers routinely underestimate, and flying over a private compound near sensitive infrastructure in Abuja or Lagos is often simply not available.
8. Solmetric SunEye 210
What it does best. A handheld fisheye skyline instrument. Stand at a point on the roof, take one capture, and it returns the measured sky obstruction and monthly solar access percentage for that exact position with no modelling assumption in the answer. When a shading number is disputed after commissioning and a client is threatening to withhold payment, this is the strongest evidence available.
Pricing. US$2,195 base for North America, roughly NGN 3.4 million before import duty and clearing, as capital equipment rather than a subscription, and it includes a lifetime PV Designer licence. This is a current product, not a discontinued one, though as of 2 August 2026 it is out of stock with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time. Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced on 12 September 2023.
Honest limitations. It measures points, not arrays, so a large roof needs many captures and interpolation. It cannot model the neighbour’s building that has not been built yet or the tree at ten-year height, which are the specific Nigerian risks. Lead time and servicing both route abroad. Treat it as an audit instrument rather than a design tool.
9. PVGIS Horizon Import
What it does best. The European Commission Joint Research Centre’s PVGIS tool gives free irradiance data and a far-horizon profile for any Nigerian coordinate, derived from terrain elevation data. Export the horizon and import it into PVsyst or another engine and your model accounts for the hill or escarpment behind the site instead of assuming a flat horizon. For sites around Jos, the Mambilla plateau or hilly parts of the middle belt, that is a real correction, and it costs nothing.
Pricing. Free.
Honest limitations. It sees terrain, not buildings. A compound wall three metres away does not exist in a PVGIS horizon, and on the typical Nigerian urban roof the wall is the entire problem. Never present a PVGIS horizon as a shading study. It is one input to a scene, not a scene.
10. Victron, Sunsynk and Deye Inverter Tooling
What it does best. None of these vendors ships a shading model, and that is not what they are for. What Victron’s VRM portal and the Sunsynk and Deye monitoring apps give you is the measured record: PV input power minute by minute, battery state of charge across the day, and on Victron in particular per-tracker input data. That record is how you find shading after the fact. A morning dip on one tracker while the other holds, repeating at the same clock time every day and drifting slowly across the year, is a shadow. A whole-array reduction that is flat across the day and recovers after rain is harmattan dust.
Pricing. Free with the hardware, which is already on most Nigerian hybrid sites.
Honest limitations. It is entirely retrospective. It cannot tell you anything before the system is installed, which is when the design decision is made, and it will not attribute a loss to a specific obstruction. Use it to validate or refute a shading model, never as a substitute for one. The battery energy storage system and state of charge concepts behind those charts are covered in QBits Energy’s hybrid battery sizing guide.
Is a Shading Report Required in Nigeria?
Plainly: no. There is no Nigerian regulation that mandates a shading study for a solar installation. The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission governs generation, distribution, metering and mini-grid permits, and its framework does not require a shading analysis as a submission document for a rooftop or hybrid system. Unlike the UK, where the MCS Standard Estimation Method defines a shading factor inside a regulated calculation, nothing here obliges you. We are not going to invent a requirement that does not exist.
What does exist is commercial pressure, and it is sharper than in a grid-tied market.
- Development finance and donor programmes. DFI-funded and Rural Electrification Agency linked projects come with technical review, and shading appears as an explicit line in the loss tree. PVsyst and HOMER outputs are what evaluators expect to see.
- Performance and fuel-savings guarantees. If your contract promises a percentage of generator runtime removed, the shading assumption is the thing you are underwriting. We attach the shading heatmap to the contract for exactly that reason.
- Client fuel logs. Nigerian commercial clients track diesel purchases carefully because it is a large, visible cost. A shortfall against a promised fuel saving surfaces within one month, not one year, and a documented shading study is the difference between a conversation and a refund.
- Battery warranty disputes. A shaded array that repeatedly fails to bring the bank to full charge deepens cycling and shortens life. When the battery underperforms, the shading model is the first document anyone asks for.
Market and capacity context for these arguments sits with the IEA and IRENA.
Mistakes Nigerian Design Teams Make on Shading
-
1
Pricing the shading loss at the grid tariff. On a hybrid site the replacement energy usually comes from fuel, not from the utility, so the loss is worth two to four times more than the tariff calculation suggests.
-
2
Reporting an annual percentage and stopping. The client needs generator hours and litres. Those require an hourly load profile and a battery state of charge simulation, not a single figure.
-
3
Copying a European row pitch. At 6.5N a 2.28 m module at 15 degrees needs about 2.66 m of pitch, not 5 m. The wasted roof never appears in the proposal.
-
4
Recording harmattan soiling as shading. Run the four-check test. Re-stringing an array to fix a dust problem spends money and fixes nothing.
-
5
Modelling the tree and the neighbour at today's height. Both grow. Model the tree at ten-year height and the adjacent plot at the height it may legally reach.
-
6
Grouping shaded and unshaded modules on the same MPPT. Shade is non-linear. An 8 percent shaded area can cost 15 to 22 percent of energy once bypass diodes and string mismatch are counted, and on a hybrid that shortfall lands on the battery.
Should a Nigerian Team Standardise on SurgePV for Shading?
- ✓ You want a shading study on every hybrid quote, not only financed jobs
- ✓ Walled compounds and tanks make scene building your bottleneck
- ✓ You need shading and harmattan soiling on separate loss lines
- ✓ You want the shading result to move the fuel number in the proposal
- ✗ The deliverable is least-cost mini-grid sizing under a shading constraint (HOMER Pro)
- ✗ A DFI lender names the tool in the document list (PVsyst)
- ✗ You must model on site with no usable data connection (PV*SOL)
- ✗ A commissioned system's shading number is formally disputed (Solmetric SunEye)
The honest recommendation for most Nigerian C&I contractors is one design platform carrying shading, layout and the proposal, plus a single HOMER Pro seat if mini-grid or fuel-guarantee work is in the pipeline. Two tools, one of which answers geometry and one of which answers economics, beats one tool pretending to answer both.
How Heaven Green Energy and SurgePV Help
Heaven Green Energy delivers EPC projects in India and provides design support across African hybrid and off-grid work, and our engineering group builds the software we run. Every hybrid proposal we issue carries a shading heatmap, a separately stated soiling assumption tied to a cleaning interval, and the fuel consequence rather than only a percentage. Entry points:
- SurgePV shadow analysis: 8,760-hour module-level shading on compound and warehouse roofs.
- SurgePV solar simulation: P50, P75 and P90 yield with editable monthly soiling for harmattan.
- Solar EPC services: turnkey delivery and independent engineering review of a disputed shading claim.
- Commercial solar and industrial solar: factory and warehouse rooftop hybrids.
- Heaven Designs BESS resource centre when you need stamped storage engineering rather than another software seat.
For the wider decision, read the best solar design software in Nigeria ranking, the solar plus storage design software roundup for battery-specific tooling, and the solar shading analysis software pillar for the engine mechanics. Choosing solar shading analysis software in Nigeria comes down to one test: can it turn a shadow into litres of fuel?
Related Solar Software Guides
- Solar Shading Analysis Software: The Global Guide
- Best Solar Shading Analysis Software in South Africa
- Best Solar Shading Analysis Software in India
- Best Solar Design Software in Nigeria
- Best Solar Proposal Software in Nigeria
- Best Solar Software in Nigeria: The Full Stack
- Best Solar Design Software: The Global Ranking
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best solar shading analysis software in Nigeria in 2026?
SurgePV ranks first for the design side at US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, roughly NGN 2.0 million. It runs 8,760-hour module-level simulation with bypass-diode physics, builds the near-object scene from satellite imagery in about a minute, keeps harmattan soiling on a separate monthly line, and feeds the shading result into hybrid sizing so a shadow moves the fuel number. HOMER Pro at US$1,575 a year on Base or US$3,100 on Professional is better at the economic question of how many generator hours the shading causes. Note that PVsyst at CHF 700 per user per year and PV*SOL premium at EUR 845 are both cheaper per seat than SurgePV.
Why does shading cost more in Nigeria than in a grid-tied market?
Because of what replaces the lost energy. In a net metering market a shading loss means a slightly higher utility bill. On a Nigerian hybrid the load still has to be served, and if the grid is absent at that hour the generator runs. Diesel energy costs around NGN 400 per kWh at NGN 1,200 per litre and 0.33 litres per kWh, and a small petrol set runs between roughly NGN 600 and NGN 900 per kWh, against a NERC Band A tariff near NGN 200. The same percentage loss is two to four times more expensive.
How much row spacing does a solar array need in Lagos?
Very little. At 6.5N the December solar noon elevation is about 60 degrees, so one metre of array height casts only 0.58 m of shadow. A 2.28 m module in portrait at 15 degrees tilt needs roughly 2.66 m of pitch to stay clear through a 9 am to 3 pm design window on 21 December, a ground coverage ratio near 0.83. The equivalent Cape Town figure is about 4.47 m. Copying a high-latitude pitch costs a Lagos roof roughly 40 percent of its capacity.
Can an annual shading percentage tell me how much extra diesel I will burn?
No, and this is the central limitation. Converting a shading loss into fuel requires knowing which hours the loss falls in, what the load was doing in those hours, whether the grid was present, and where the battery state of charge sat. An annual percentage has discarded all of that. You need an hourly production series, an hourly load profile and a dispatch simulation. HOMER Pro does this natively; a design tool with hybrid modelling does an approximate version of it.
Is harmattan dust shading or soiling?
Soiling, and treating it as shading is a common and expensive error. Harmattan deposits fine Saharan dust from roughly November to February, and the resulting loss is broadly uniform across the array, flat across the daylight curve, and recovers sharply after heavy rain. Shading is geometric, clusters into a fixed daily time window, and does not respond to rain at all. The fix for dust is a cleaning interval. Re-stringing an array to solve it changes nothing and costs real money.
Is a shading study legally required for solar in Nigeria?
No. There is no Nigerian regulation mandating a shading analysis. NERC governs generation, distribution, metering and mini-grid permits and does not require a shading study as a submission document. The pressure is contractual instead: development finance and Rural Electrification Agency programme reviews expect shading in the loss tree, fuel-savings guarantees make the shading assumption the thing you are underwriting, and clients with a detailed diesel log notice a shortfall within one month.
Which shading tools work on Nigerian sites with poor connectivity?
PVsyst and PV*SOL Premium both run fully offline on a laptop, which is why they remain in Nigerian toolkits despite dated interfaces. SurgePV, HelioScope, Aurora and Scanifly are cloud-based and need a usable connection. The workable pattern for most teams is to capture measurements, obstruction heights and photographs on site, then build the shading scene in the office. If you genuinely must model in the field, weight offline capability heavily and accept losing AI roof capture.
How much does shading analysis software cost in Nigeria?
Quote the vendor currency first. PVsyst Professional is CHF 700 per user per year, PV*SOL premium EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT, SurgePV US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, HOMER Pro US$1,575 to US$4,650 a year depending on tier, HelioScope US$1,620 to US$2,640, and Aurora Solar US$1,620 to US$2,640 on annual billing. A Solmetric SunEye 210 is US$2,195 base plus import duty. Scanifly does not publish pricing. PVGIS and inverter vendor monitoring are free. At roughly NGN 1,550 to the dollar, NGN 1,675 to the euro and NGN 1,940 to the Swiss franc those land near NGN 1.36m, NGN 1.42m, NGN 2.0m, NGN 2.4m to 7.2m, NGN 2.5m to 4.1m, NGN 2.5m to 4.1m and NGN 3.4m respectively. Exchange rate movement changes all of the naira figures.
Stop paying for four tools. Design it all in one.
SurgePV replaces Aurora + HelioScope + PVsyst + a separate proposal tool in a single license. AI 3D roof in under 60 seconds, bankable 8,760-hour simulation, auto-SLD, BOQ, DXF/DWG export and branded proposals.
Free trial, no credit card · $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team planDisclaimer: SurgePV is our own product. It is built by the Heaven Group, the same company as Heaven Green Energy, so treat this as a recommendation from its maker.